Vietnamese-Korean advises a presidential candidate
Posted : 2017-04-14 14:01
The Korea Times
By Kim Ji-soo
Won Ok-kum was named an honorary mayor of Seoul in October 2016. / Courtesy of Won Ok-kum
Nguyen Ngoc Cam smiled broadly as she pulled out three name cards from her purse on meeting this reporter _ one for her role as an honorary mayor of Seoul, one for her role as president of the translation and interpretation company Dong Hanh, and the third for her role as a representative of Vietnam Community in Seoul. The latter is a group representing the interests of Vietnamese people in the greater Seoul area.
Nguyen also has a Korean name,
Won Ok-kum.
At her office in Mangwon-dong, northwestern Seoul, April 5, the vivacious mother of two children was in the midst of a meeting with fellow Vietnamese Trieu Van Manh. Trieu had just been released from a detention center at Incheon International Airport, 20 days after the Korean company he worked for, a construction firm, had illegally cancelled his work contract.
With interpretation and translation help from Won, Trieu was released from detention and will start work with the same employer.
This is what Won does a lot these days, helping Vietnamese people in Korea who are caught in a legal conundrum for one reason or another.
As head of Vietnam Community, Won has been tapped to help
Moon Jae-in, the presidential candidate of the liberal Democratic Party of Korea, work with a group of female advisers on policies for women. This is not the first time she has worked with Moon; she participated in his first presidential bid in 2012. Moon is currently enjoying the lead over the four other candidates for the May 9 presidential election. They are Ahn Cheol-soo of the minor liberal People's Party; Yoo Seong-min of the Bareun Party, Hong Joon-pyo of Liberty Korea Party and Sim Sang-jung of the opposition Justice Party.
All candidates have a group of advisers, but Moon has several that focus on specific issues. And having an advisory group on women's issues seems fitting. Even though Korea has seen significant progress in women's rights in recent years, women here, who comprise half the voters, still face more challenges regarding housework, marriage and other social norms.
"I would like to propose a fairer distribution of welfare benefits across a range of foreign residents in Korea," Won said. There are an estimated 2.1 million foreign residents in Seoul, about 1.1 million of whom are women. But welfare benefits are currently given to only 280,000 people mainly in multicultural families, she said.
"But there is a far larger number of people who come to Korea to study, live and work, and we should build counseling centers for these people too," she said. She also recommended providing other benefits to foreign residents and their families, such as expanding government subsidies for their children.
She joined the group that includes a wide range of women experts in various fields including Choi Gyeong-sook, the former chief of an anti-nuclear group; Pi Woo-jin, the nation's first female military helicopter pilot; and Choi Hyeong-sook, chief of Intree, a group that supports single mothers and others.
The advisory group met on April 2 at a cafe in Mapo, Seoul, during which each member presented her policy recommendations. Moon did not come, but Won hopes to meet him in person.
As a Vietnamese married to a Korean, Won sees similarities between Moon's work as a human rights lawyer and the causes she promotes for Vietnamese residents in Korea.
Won is originally from Dong Nai in Vietnam. She met her Korean husband while he was working on a construction site in Vietnam where she was serving as an interpreter. They got married, and she came to Korea in 1997.
"Twenty years, I have been living in Korea," she said, smiling broadly. Asked on the top challenges she faced adjusting to a new life in Korea, she paused for a while before saying cautiously, "I experienced prejudice. It was prejudice either in the form of people ignoring me because I was a foreigner, or by speaking to me in ‘banmal,'" Won said, referring the casual form of speech in Korean that is in contrast to the polite form people usually use when meeting someone for the first time or speaking to someone older.
She said she didn't mention this experience at the Sunday meeting of female advisers. However, she has been working with foreign residents' groups to have an anti-prejudice law legislated.
"(The anti-prejudice law) won't just be about the foreign residents in Seoul, but any group that is in the minority, including gender minority groups and others," she said.
Won said she has always been an active even back in Vietnam. After arriving in Seoul, she majored in law at
Korea National Open University, where she graduated in February 2011. She then pursued graduate studies in judicial affairs at the Graduate School of Public Administration at Konkuk University in Seoul, where she graduated in August 2013. She has done a lot of interpretation work in courts. For instance, the week of the interview, she was at the Labor Court, and on Thursday, she headed to Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi Province, where she will interpret for victims in sexual assault cases.
She had experienced hardship and insecurity for much of her first 15 years in Korea, and she said money, though important, was not the main factor in her decision to do interpretation work. "Now, people see me as a role model, and I like being involved," she said. The Vietnam Community in Seoul was launched in 2014, and while there are other such community groups, this one is considered to have been set up "early" among the foreign residents in Korea, she said.
Can we expect to see her become the next foreign-born National Assembly lawmaker, following former ruling party lawmaker Jasmine Lee, who is from the Philippines?
"No, I think I am too under-qualified," she said.
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